A Post-Conference Update & info about a cool community-based writing center

I'm back from the professional conference I attended over spring break. It's the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), and is the largest and most important conference in the US for college and university teachers of writing and rhetoric. It's a large conference; I don't know the exact number of attendees at this year's conference, but I expect it was over 3500 people.

What kind of topics are talked about at a conference like this? Just about everything that scholars and teachers of rhetoric and writing might be interested--from obscure historical research on Greek and Latin rhetoricians to writing centers and writing-across-the-curriculum programs to theories and practices of teaching writing to writing and technology to assessment to community literacy, etc. There's definitely something there for everyone (at least everyone who's interested in writing and rhetoric).

One of the coolest talks that I heard was about a community literacyproject. It was a talk about a project called 826 Valencia. This is a community-based writing center. The writer Dave Eggars, author of the truly wonderful memoir _A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius_ used some of his earnings from this best-selling book to establish a writing center in the Mission District of San Francisco. This is a non-profit center that is not associated with either the public schools or with a college or university. Their mission is to provide community based support for students in the neighborhood. They also provide programs for the public schools in San Francisco--but in their talk the speakers emphasized that they are independent of the schools' bureaucracy (which in my view is good).

It was really inspiring to hear about how 826 Valencia developed from a very small storefront to a center with 600+ volunteers, some of them well-known writers like Dave Eggars. According to the presenters, 826 Valencia centers (named for the address of the original center) have been developed in Brooklyn and Seattle, and are being established other places.

Here's one more bit of info about 826 Valencia. After Eggars and his colleagues found the storefront they wanted, the owner wouldn't lease it to them unless they had some sort of retail operation. The owner didn't expect the writing center to make it and thought he could more easily lease it again if it had some retail component. So what did Eggars et al do? They decided that they would sell pirate gear! (If you've not read Eggars' memoir, you might not know that he is one witty guy--even as he writes about the heartbreaking death of his parents and his decision to become the legal guardian for his younger brother.)

Now all 826 Valencia writing centers sell something; they incorporate what they sell into the general look and feel of the writing center. The Boston 826 Valencia, for instance, sells superhero gear.

For more information about this exciting project, check out www.826valencia.org